Blackwater Digital Services Uses Accelerated File Transfer to Achieve Post-production Success
As media production becomes increasingly global, the creation of the films, video games, and television shows involves more and more partners: an intercompany exchange that brings together thousands of creative minds, and dozens of dynamic organizations. Nowhere is this more obvious than in film post production, as studios outsource duties like sound mixing, subtitling, visual effects, and more to a range of smaller houses who specialize in these tasks.
In order to successfully outsource a project, every single person involved in that project’s workflow must be able to swiftly and securely move the content on which they’re working to ensure that deadlines are met, valuable files are kept secure, and each member of the supply chain is up-to-date on the state of the production. In order to address each of these concerns, post-production houses must be ready to use the proper file transfer solutions.
Post-production success relies on fast file transfer
Blackwater Digital Services, the Atlanta-based post-production organization founded by Nathan Ross “specializes in quality control, mastering, deliverables, asset management, conversion & transcoding, worldwide digital delivery, and direct VOD distribution.” Blackwater — and the many post-production houses like it — takes its commitment to its customers seriously, and it became clear to Ross almost immediately that archaic file transfer protocols like FTP would hinder the quality of the services his organization could provide, because — as Ross explains in a case study — “[Blackwater] receive[s] and deliver[s] a lot of very large feature-length 4K ProRes files, which are about 800 Gigabytes each.”
Luckily, Ross and his team can now execute their mission with ease: “Because we have Media Shuttle, we don’t have to ship hard drives and we don’t have to wait for bandwidth to open up, we just shoot it off. It’s available within twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the content is ordered. The list of things we use Media Shuttle for goes on and on.”
Media Shuttle supports Blackwater Digital and those who depend on them
Signiant’s powerful Media Shuttle software is popular among post-production houses, specialized as it is to ensure that media and entertainment companies can achieve the accelerated file transfers on which they depend. With Media Shuttle, organizations like Blackwater can set up intuitive, easy to use portals, through which studios can simply and securely send and share files between the many post-production teams that work on each project.
Read more about how Blackwater was able to wrangle their workflows and promote incredible high-quality post-production work for their clients with the help of Signiant. Whether you’re in VFX, editing, or sound design, you too can achieve what Blackwater has!
